“It’s subjective.” That’s the response we always fall back on when we’re asked to comment on widely disparate watch opinions. Is a watch any good or is it not? The easiest and most diplomatic reply to this is to allude to how you can’t just assign a score to a watch. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What speaks to me might not speak to you. In other words — it’s subjective. But is it, really?
The appeal of a watch is certainly subjective. Individual preferences must be accounted for at all times, and not just for watches. We don’t all like the same food, the same movies, or the same books, so why on earth should we be expected to have unanimous feelings about watches? Because, my dear WorldTempus family, it’s not about feelings.
As someone who completed her higher education specialising in literature, I’m able to make the distinction between liking a book and valuing its qualities. I’ve certainly enjoyed books that I would be embarrassed to be seen in public with. I’ve also written very successful academic essays about works of high literature that I absolutely loathed having to read. My point is, you don’t have to like something to be able to tell if it’s good. And just because something is objectively trashy doesn’t mean you can’t like it. (This is, after all, the whole appeal of fast food. Which I adore.)
During the three consecutive years in which I had the honour of serving on the jury of the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève (GPHG), I devised a little system that allowed me to do precisely what I said wasn’t possible in the first paragraph of this article — I put scores on watches. As jury members, we were remarkably free of judging constraints. No one told us, grade this watch based on this or that criteria. Our capacity to assess watches from an expert’s perspective was taken as a fait accompli. However, I felt it was important to prioritise three aspects of watch performance. Design; which relates to how well a watch has been aesthetically conceived — overall balance, symmetry, proportion, harmony of lines, intelligent use of colour, material finish, measured use of texture and visual contrast. Mechanism; which relates to how well the functioning parts of a watch have been constructed — the movement constituting the largest percentage of this rubric, but also things like the operation of the crown, how intuitive it is to adjust the watch, the clarity and precision of displays such as the date or moon phase. Lastly, there is Innovation, which I define as the additional value that a watch is able to bring to the horological field — whether it genuinely enriches our industry with something new or is simply a beautiful and well-made exemplar of existing principles and concepts.
I’m a big fan of structuring our approach to watches, because it allows us to have meaningful discussions about them, in terms that we can all understand and employ. It creates a useful baseline for us that has nothing to do with whether or not you like a watch, because it is impossible to have productive debate based on whether or not you like something. You can’t argue someone into liking something. It’d be like trying to feed spinach to a cat. And I don’t think it detracts from the allure of fine watchmaking, as some might suggest, to talk about them in quantifiable ways. Everyone understands that the emotional appeal of a diamond is quite separate from how the stone is ranked in terms of the famous Four Cs — Carat, Cut, Clarity and Colour. Why shouldn’t watches be the same way?
I henceforth promise to stop evading questions about watch quality and performance with ambiguous references to subjective opinions. If I like a watch, I’ll say just as much, even if I don’t particularly think it’s technically, conceptually or aesthetically brilliant. If I don’t like a watch, I will still do my professional best to evaluate it in a way that’s fair and justifiable. How about that?
I should probably stop this article right here. But I do want to bring some context to why this idea has been on my mind, and I regret to say I’m taking us back to the topic of fast food. Just last week, the citizens of Geneva rejoiced in our first city-wide burger competition, a weeklong event during which the burger-loving inhabitants of our town could visit participating restaurants, consume their burger offerings, and then issue scores via a dedicated online portal that prompted us to assign each burger a rating based on four different criteria. Not only did this induce me to gorge on far more burgers than I would usually permit myself, but it also obliged me to think about what was going into my stomach, to take a more considered attitude towards what I ingested. I was eating with joy, yes, but also with purpose. These are two words I’d like to see more frequently applied to the interactions we have with and around watches. Joyful and purposeful.
